Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned ghost story in gaming? It feels like for years, horror games have been squelching around in gore, ultra-violence, and tedious amounts of mutilation. Zombies, mutants, and sci-fi monstrosities have exorcised horror of the more ethereal flavour - the kind of horror where something dark moves in the corner of your eye, but you turn to find that there’s nothing there, the kind of horror where the shadows aren’t a place for you to hide, but a place where ominous silhouettes silently intensify your growing unease.
That’s the kind of horror that typified the first three games of theFatal Frame(orProject Zero, as it was known in Europe) trilogy on the PS2, released between 2001 and 2005. The imagery in these games is disturbing while being largely goreless, more closely evoking the J-horror movies of the era likeRingu,The Grudge,andDark Water, with similar themes of past traumas leading to vengeful spirits in the present day.
They’re some of the most dread-inducing games of all time, easily drowning out the technical limitations of the PS2 in suffocating atmosphere, excellent buildups and releases of tension, and overcame one of the most awkward aspects of horror games at the time - the combat - by weaponising a camera, of all things.
If Silent Hill at its best is an exercise in scarcity of sound design, with long silences interrupted by garbled radio static to signify monsters, or the industrial clangs of Akira Yamaoka’s sparse soundtrack, then Fatal Frame was much sound. This is established the moment you first set foot in the first game’s Himoro Mansion, as you’re hit by a wall of layered choral wailing that sounds like the cries of a hundred anguished, angered spirits trapped in walls of the building. Each track in the game is a cold, reverb-filled assault on your ears, and then, just as the tension becomes unbearable, it makes way for silence - usually a signal that an aggressive spirit is lurking nearby.
Get your camera ready, because things are about to get intense…
The combat is a fascinating aspect of Project Zero. Like a spectral version of Pokemon Snap, you take photos of the spirits besetting you using a Camera Obscura - a magical camera which can fend off spirits using different types of what’s essentially anti-ghost film. The combat is arcadey, with combos and perfectly timed shots stacking up your damage bonuses, but also wonderfully suspenseful, as you deal more damage the closer the ghost gets to attacking you. The confusing, distorted cries for help as they bear down on you, as well as the inherent clumsiness of manual first-person aiming on the PS2 controller, really captures the feel of holding a camera with shaking hands, trying to keep the focus on your target while the camera slowly recharges.
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The beauty of the first three Project Zero/Fatal Frame games was that you really felt the devs over at Tecmo refine the formula over the three games. The first game’s visuals and combat system feel rudimentary even compared to the second game, where refined controls made it far more feasible to fight multiple ghosts at once.
The setting and premise evolved too; the first game set in a fairly classic haunted mansion, the second spread across an entire village. The third game, however was the most intriguing to me. In Fatal Frame 3, you explored the mansion from the first game in the protagonist’s dreams, in between which you resided in her perfectly ordinarly modern-day urban Japnese house.
You’re hit by a wall of layered choral wailing that sounds like the cries of a hundred anguished spirits trapped in walls of the building.
Eventually, however, strange paranormal occurrences seem to seep out of her dreams and into her home, which is where the series really converged with J-horror. The tatami mats, the minimal decor, the shoji room dividers, the seemingly perpetual grey skies and rain outside - all seemingly ordinary and yet loaded with associations to people exposed to those movies of the late 90s.Project Zero 3 plays on those fears beautifully, with some of those early apparitions easy to miss before becoming more overt and menacing later on (just keep an eye on that suspiciously short curtain in the lounge).
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Later entries in the Fatal Frame series suffered for being confined to Wii and Wii U exclusivity, which meant they were designed around both consoles' respective motion control gimmicks, and also seemed to take on brighter, less realistic art styles to better tailor the games for those audiences. In other words, they lost special something, and since Maiden of Blakc Water came out for Wii U in 2014, the series has seemingly been dead in the water.
But recently there’s been renewed hope, and the possibility that we may see that original trilogy restored in some form. Last year, Koei Tecmo surprisingly re-released the Wii U’s Project Zero: Maiden of Black Water on modern platforms. Following on from that, just a couple of months ago, Koei Tecmo announced that it will be re-releasing its second Fatal Frame/Project Zero game in as many years, with the 2008 Wii game Mask of the Lunar Eclipse set to come out early in 2023.
It’s auspicious signalling from the publisher, who are seemingly testing the waters for reviving the long-dormant series. Likewise, the signalling from series fans has been positive Black Water garnered 79% ‘Positive’ reviews from players on Steam, andSteamSpy data suggeststhe game has 50,000-100,000 owners on Steam, which is pretty good going for a PC port of a Wii U game that’s widely regarded as the worst in its series.
That does, however, lead to the next question, which is why Koei Tecmo is starting by re-releasing two of the series' weaker entries (both of which were designed for the respective Wii and Wii U motion control gimmicks, making them inherently compromised on platforms with traditional controls)? Why not put your best foot forward with what are regarded as some of the scariest games of all time?
To some extent, that could come down to the fact that the original games are, well,old, and modern games are more likely to get the hooks into modern audiences.
I could give a thousand chin-scratchy and sensible reasons why the original trilogy is better than latter-day entries, but the 2014 game has far more modern conveniences in terms of controls, UI, graphics, an all-new Photo Mode, not to mention utterly pointless costume customisation for your overly hot and ditsy protagonist. With its brighter palettes and more visualpop, Maiden of Black Water is simply more eye-catching than the tastefully dour PS2 games. In that regard, working backwards through the series is a shrewd business move by Koei Tecmo - get people into the series with the most accessible stuff, before tracking back towards the more elegant but arcane earlier entries.
Then there’s the fact that consumers can, well, be real consumers sometimes. Trawling through user reviews and comments for the Black Water re-release, countless people are calling for the original trilogy to be re-released, or even urging other players to ‘buy Black Water to show your support for the series in the hope that the original trilogy gets re-released.’ The latter is just terrible consumer logic that absolutely no one should abide by unless you want to live in a dystopian future where corporations feed us re-releases of inferior games, knowing that we’ll keep lapping them up in the hope of eventually getting ‘the good stuff.’ Have some self-respect, people - buy a gamebecause you want to buy the game, not in some kind of attempt get another game.
But strange consumer practices aside, it’s an interesting time for a series that, at its best, is among the most terrifying in videogame horror. The upcoming re-release of Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is by all accounts a far superior game to Maiden of Black Water, and will hopefully continue building the series' momentum into making a full-on comeback. Like the wielder of the Camera Obscura, waiting for that perfect moment to snap a nefarious spirit into oblivion, we just need to be patient.
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